Defendu is a modern kind of martial art. Eric A. Sykes and William E. Fairbairn founded it. It follows the system of jujutsu and is a hand to hand combat system developed to train the Municipal Police in Shanghai and later carried forward by the OSS and SOE during the Second World War. Fairbairn started developing his own system of hand to hand combat based on his training at Kodokan in Tokyo. While there, he was involved in several fights during his tenure with police work. Defendu is easy to learn and has effective results. He has written several books on the purpose of martial arts and importance of Defendu in particular. Later, Fairbairn was asked to train the Allies during the Second World War, by Britain, and by this time Defendu had gained a good amount of reputation and also set a record. Fairbairn and his mates broadened this system and created Close Quarters Combat System, which was the form, taught to these Allied troops. Though this form was based on Defendu, it was modified for application at war rather than for the purpose of controlling riots and being handy to the police. While Defendu focussed mostly on self-defence and restraint, Close Quarters Combat system focussed on fastened disabling of an enemy with sufficient lethal force.
William E. Fairbairn was born in 1885 and died in 1960. He was a British soldier, exponent of hand to hand combat method, the Close combat and a police officer for the Shanghai police during the World Wars. He was the one that worked out his individualistic fighting system, which came to be known as Defendu and other important weapon tactics that came to be used in the wars. Around 1901, he had also served the Royal Marine Light Infantry and later in 1907 he joined the Shanghai Municipal Police. By the end of the Second World War, Fairbairn rose to the ranks of Lieutenant Colonel and received the US Legion of Merit. Together with Eric Sykes, he worked out an innovative range of pistol shooting techniques and handgun specifications along with a number of police innovations such as armoured Mauser proof vests, riot batons and others. Their best-known weapon is probably the famous Fairbairn Sykes fighting knife or Commando knife that was predominantly used by British Special Forces during the Second World War.
Eric A. Sykes was born in 1883 and died in 1945. He used to initially work with an import export company that used to deal in weapons and ammunition in East Asia. He later voluntarily served the British army as a sharpshooter on the Western Front during the Great War. In 1917, he returned to China and joined the Shanghai Municipal Police as an inspector in 1926 where he met Fairbairn. He became a hunter at a relatively young age and thus grew onto becoming an avid rifleman as well as an expert with using the pistol. As a member of the SMP volunteers, he later went on to oversee a team of civilian and police snipers. After Sykes met Fairbairn, they began a professional association. When in 1940 Fairbairn resigned from the Shanghai police and returned to Britain, Sykes followed and both soon got commissioned to the British army on the General List. However by the mid 1940s the friendship between the two split with Sykes claiming that Fairbairn constantly treated him as an inferior. Thereafter Sykes went to Canada to teach commandos and the American covert agents both armed and unarmed combat. By the end of his life, he attained the rank of Major.
In the beginning of the Second World War, the Allies were in need of every advantage to get their soldiers and force a winning edge and this advantage they found in Fairbairn's Defendu system. Hence he was commissioned by the British commandos in order to train them. The location where he trained his commandos and the commandos who received training under him was top secret. These specially trained commandos then went on to train the rest of the US army, marines, rangers and OSS operatives, some of who later joined the CIA and FBI as they had already acquired the foundation of their basic training. The evolution of Defendu began when the Fairbairn Fighting System was introduced at Camp X in conjunction with input from many highly placed instructors from various backgrounds and with different kinds of fighting skills. Throughout this period, much progress was seen in the field of close quarters battle as well as unarmed combat. Eventually Allied soldiers referred to the art as Defendu in slang terms when the form was added to and refined with the help of western fighting principles.